An Innocent Client

PART I

April 12

7:00 a. m

It was my fortieth birthday, and the first thing I had to do was deal with Johnny Wayne Neal. The forensic psychiatrist I’d hired to examine him said Johnny Wayne was a narcissist, a pathological liar, and a sociopath, and those were his good qualities. He called Johnny Wayne an “irredeemable monster.” I’d asked the shrink not to write any of that down. I didn’t want the district attorney to see it. Monster or not, Johnny Wayne was still my client.

Johnny Wayne Neal had hired two of his thug buddies to murder his beautiful, heavily insured young wife. She woke up at 3:00 a.m. on a Wednesday morning about a year ago to find two strangers standing over her bed. The men clumsily and brutally stabbed her to death while Johnny Wayne’s three-year-old son, who’d been sleeping with his mother that night, crawled beneath the bed and listened to the sounds of his mother dying.

It took the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation and the Johnson City Police Department less than a week to figure out who was responsible for the murder. Johnny Wayne was arrested and charged with both first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit first-degree murder, and because of the heinous nature of the crime, the state of Tennessee was seeking the death penalty. A heartless judge appointed me to defend him. The hourly rate was a hundred bucks, about the same as a small-time prostitute’s.

The prosecutor had offered to take the death penalty off the table if Johnny Wayne would plead guilty to first-degree murder and agree to go to prison for the rest of his life. When I told Johnny Wayne about the offer a week ago, he’d reluctantly agreed. We were supposed to be in court at 9:00 a.m. so Johnny Wayne could enter his plea. I was at the jail early in the morning to make sure he hadn’t changed his mind.

Fifteen minutes after I sat down in the attorney’s room, Johnny Wayne, in a sharply creased, unwrinkled orange jumpsuit, was escorted in. He was handcuffed, waist-chained, and shackled around the ankles.

“I wanted to make sure you’re still willing to take this deal before we go to court,” I said as soon as the uniformed escort stepped out and Johnny Wayne awkwardly made his way into the chair. “Once you enter the plea, there’s no turning back.”

Johnny Wayne stared at the tabletop. His short hair was the color of baled straw, wispy and perfectly combed. He was much smaller than me, well under six feet, thin and pale. His face and arms were covered with tiny pinkish freckles. He started tapping his fingers on the table, and I noticed that his nails looked recently manicured. He smelled of shampoo.

“How do you manage to stay so well groomed in this place?” I said. “Every time I see you, you look like you just came out of a salon.”

He rolled his eyes. They were a pale green, sometimes flecked with red, depending on angle and light. They were closely set and the left eye had a tendency to wander. It made looking him in the eye uncomfortable. I never quite knew where to focus.

“The fact that I’m incarcerated doesn’t require me to live like an animal,” he said. “I’m able to procure certain services.”

“You mean a barber?”

“I have a barber, one of the inmates, who comes to my cell once a week. He trims my beard and shampoos and cuts my hair.”

“Does he give you a manicure, too?” I glanced at his fingernails.

“I do that myself.”

“Who does your laundry? All my other clients look like they sleep in their jail uniforms.” I could tell the questions were irritating him, which encouraged me to keep asking.

“My laundry is done along with everyone else’s,” he said. “I simply purchase commissary products for an individual who treats my laundry with special care.” His speech was a tinny, nasal tenor, his diction perfect. I imagined shoving a handful of horse manure into his mouth, just so he’d mispronounce a word.

“Why are you so interested in my personal hygiene?” Johnny Wayne said. “Does it offend you?”

“Nah,” I said, “I was just curious.”

His disdain for me was palpable. With each visit I could sense it growing like metastasizing cancer, but I didn’t care. I disliked him as intensely as he disliked me. He’d lied to me dozens of times. He’d run me and my investigator all over east Tennessee following false leads and locating bogus witnesses. He whined constantly.

“So now that we have those incredibly important matters out of the way,” Johnny Wayne said, “explain this deal, as you so eloquently put it, one more time.”

“It’s simple,” I said. “A moron could understand it.”

“Are you insinuating that I’m a moron?”

Answering the question truthfully would have served no useful purpose, so I ignored it.

“The deal is you plead guilty to first-degree murder. You agree to a sentence of life without the possibility of parole. You give up your right to appeal. In exchange, you get to live. No needle for Johnny Wayne. That’s it, simple and sweet.”

He snorted. “Doesn’t sound like much of a deal to me.”

“Depends on your point of view.”

“Meaning?”

“It depends on whether you want to spend the rest of your life in the general prison population where you can at least have some semblance of a life or spend the next fifteen years in isolation on death row, then die by lethal injection.”

“But I’m innocent.”

“Of course you are. Unfortunately, the evidence says otherwise.”

“All circumstantial. Or lies.”

I’d heard that line dozens of times. Like nearly every other criminal I’d represented, he’d proclaimed his innocence so many times he was beginning to believe it.

“What about the cell phone records that match exactly with the statements Clive and Derek gave the police?” I said. “The calls they say you made to check on them while they were on their way up here to kill Laura, and while they were on their way back.”

The muscles in his jaw tightened. Johnny Wayne didn’t like discussing facts.

“What about the four separate life insurance policies you took out on Laura over the past eighteen months? Three hundred and fifty grand, Johnny Wayne.”

“Lots of people over-insure their spouses.”

“Explain why Derek and Clive would say you hired them to kill Laura and promised to give them ten percent of the insurance money.”

“They’re trying to save themselves.”

“If you didn’t hire them, why’d they do it? They didn’t even know her.”

“Why? Why? Why are you asking me all these stupid questions? You’re supposed to be my lawyer.”

I should have brought up the audio tape, but I didn’t really feel like arguing with him. Clive and Derek, the thugs he hired, had both caved immediately during the interrogation. They confessed and told the police Johnny Wayne had hired them. The police outfitted them with tape recorders and sent them to see Johnny Wayne, who talked freely about the murder and the money. The first time I played the tape for him his face turned an odd shade.

“Listen to me,” I said. “Part of a lawyer’s job is to give his client good advice. And my advice is that the prosecution could bring in a trained monkey and convict you of this murder. The evidence is overwhelming, the murder was especially cruel, and your little boy witnessed it. My advice is that your chances of getting the death penalty are better than excellent.”

“I didn’t kill anyone,” he said.

“Maybe not, but she’d be alive if it weren’t for you. The jury will hold you accountable.”

“So I’m supposed to spend the rest of my life in prison for something I didn’t do.”

“You can either accept the state’s offer and plead, or you can go to trial.”

“With a lawyer who thinks I’m guilty.”

“Don’t put this on me. I’m just giving you an honest opinion as to what I think the outcome will be. You should be thankful. Your mother- and father-in-law don’t believe in the death penalty. They think if you’re convicted and sentenced to death, your blood will somehow be on their hands. They’re the ones who talked the district attorney into making this offer.”

“They’re hypocritical fools,” Johnny Wayne said.

I wanted to backhand him. James and Rita Miller, the parents of his murdered, beautiful, innocent young wife, were two of the nicest people I’d ever met. I interviewed them as I was preparing for trial. One of the questions I asked was how a nice young lady like Laura had ever become involved with Johnny Wayne. James Miller told me Laura met Johnny Wayne while she was attending college at Carson-Newman, a small school in Jefferson City, only sixty miles away. Johnny Wayne, who lived in Jefferson City and was a part-time student, had made himself a fixture at the Baptist Student Union, a gathering place for students of the Baptist faith. It was there that he ran his con on Laura, convincing her that he held deep convictions about Christianity. James and Rita said they had concerns, but they trusted Laura’s judgment. Johnny Wayne seemed intelligent and acted as though he loved Laura. They never imagined a monster lurked beneath the careful grooming and easy smile. But the marriage began to show serious cracks soon after the wedding and steadily broke down. Not long after their third anniversary, Johnny Wayne left Laura for another woman and moved to North Carolina. He was in Charlotte at a bar with his newly-pregnant girlfriend the night Laura was murdered. I looked at Johnny Wayne and envisioned my knuckles cracking into his teeth. It was an image I found soothing.

“What’s it going to be?” I said. “I need an answer. We’re supposed to be in court in two hours.”

“I need more time to consider it.”

“No, you don’t. It’s a gift. Take it or leave it.”

His hands went to his nose and he began his obnoxious habit of squeezing his nostrils together with his thumb and index finger. Squeeze and hold. Release. Squeeze and hold. Release.

After three squeeze-and-holds, he said, “I’ll do it. Go ahead and throw me to the wolves.”

“Good decision,” I said. “First one you’ve made in a while.”

“Are we done here?”

“I suppose. You in a hurry?”

“I have to take a crap. It’s the bologna they serve in this dump.” His voice, like his face, was devoid of emotion. Once again, he hadn’t bothered to ask about his son. He hadn’t mentioned the boy in months.

I got up and pushed the button on the wall to summon the guards. Johnny Wayne remained seated while I leaned against the wall and stared at the ceiling. I didn’t want to sit back down. I wanted to be as far away from him as possible. After three or four minutes, I could hear the thump of heavy boots as the guards made their way down the hallway toward the door.

“Hey, Dillard,” Johnny Wayne said suddenly.

“What?”

“Everybody thinks she was such a saint. She was stupid. All she had to do was give me a divorce on my terms, which weren’t that complicated. She brought this on herself.”

“Don’t say another word,” I said.

The door clanged and the guards pushed their way through and gathered him up. One of them, a skin-headed, thick-necked youngster, looked me up and down.

“You only do criminal defense, ain’t that right?” he said.

“That’s right.”

“Then I reckon you’ll be glad to know that an old lady called into dispatch a little while ago and reported that her cat found a human pecker out near the lake. A body’ll probably turn up soon.”

“A pecker? Do you mean a penis?”

“Penis to you. Pecker to me.”

“So?”

“Thought you’d like to know. A dead body means business for you, don’t it? Sort of like an undertaker.”

He winked at his partner and they shared a laugh. Even Johnny Wayne smiled. After they left, I stayed on the wall for a few minutes, their laughter and Johnny Wayne’s vulgar confession replaying in my head. The rattle of the chains faded as they led him away.

My head started to pound and my stomach tightened as I made my way back through the labyrinth of steel and concrete. I was sick of defending the Johnny Wayne Neals of this world, and I was sick of being mocked and laughed at by jerks like the two guards. I reminded myself that I was getting out of the legal profession. In less than a year, I’d be free of it. No more Johnny Waynes. No more jerks.

As I made my way toward the entrance, I tried to tell myself to take it easy. Don’t let it get to you. You’re just doing a job. An important job. I forced myself to think about something more pleasant. My birthday. Celebrating with my wife Caroline and our kids, the most important and beautiful people in my life. Chocolate cake. What would I wish for this year?

It came to me as I stepped out the front door into the rain, and the thought made me smile. The chances of the wish coming true were about a million to one, but what the heck? Why not?

This year, I’d make my birthday wish simple and selfish. This year, before I gave up the practice of law, I’d wish for one? — ?just one? — ?innocent client.

April 12

8:45 a.m.

An hour later, I was sitting in my truck in the parking lot at the Washington County Courthouse in downtown Jonesborough. It’s a postcard-pretty little town, the oldest in Tennessee, nestled in the rolling hills ninety miles northeast of Knoxville. I looked across the street at the National Storytelling Center, which was built a few years ago and brings Jonesborough a limited amount of national acclaim. Every October, thousands of people gather for a huge storytelling festival. I smiled as I thought about the irony of having a storytelling center so near the courthouse. There were whoppers being told in both places.

As the raindrops patted against the windshield, I opened the console, took out a bottle of mouthwash, and gargled. I’d gotten in the habit of carrying the mouthwash with me because my mouth seemed to stay dry and bitter during the day, especially when I had to go in front of a judge or jury. The dryness was accompanied by a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach and a nagging sense of impending doom. It would disappear sometimes when I was with my family, but it was never far away. At night, I kept having a dream where I was on a makeshift raft without a paddle, floating down the middle of a wide, raging river that was rushing me toward a deadly waterfall. I couldn’t get to the side of the river, and I couldn’t go back upstream. I’d wake up just as I went over the falls.

I put the cap back on the bottle and took a deep breath. Show time. I climbed out of the truck and walked up the courthouse steps, through the foyer, and up to the security station.

The security officer was John Allen “Sarge” Hurley, a gruff but good-natured old coot with whom I traded friendly insults every chance I got. Sarge was legendary around the sheriff’s department for his bravery and machismo. My favorite story about him was the time Sarge single-handedly apprehended a notorious armed robber named Dewey Davis after Davis held up a grocery store on the outskirts of Jonesborough. A much younger Sarge, responding to a robbery-in-progress call, showed up just as Dewey was walking out the front door of the Winn-Dixie carrying a shotgun. As the story goes, Sarge jumped out of his cruiser oblivious to the shotgun, ran Dewey down in the parking lot, and knocked him unconscious with one punch before he hauled him off to jail.

Sarge had to be in his early seventies now. He was still tall and lean, but Mother Nature was beginning to bend him like an old poplar in a stiff wind. There were dark liver spots on his huge hands, and his upper lip had retreated until it was tight across his dentures, giving him a permanent snarl. The buckle on his gun belt was notched two inches above his navel, but he had no holster and no gun. He carried only a nightstick and small can of pepper spray.

“What’s up, Sarge?” I said as I walked through the metal detector.

“The rent,” he growled. “I hear your boy Johnny Wayne is throwin’ in the towel today.” The sheriff’s department was a more efficient gossip pipeline than a sewing circle. Sarge always knew what was happening, sometimes before it happened.

“Good news travels fast,” I said.

“Can’t believe they ain’t gonna give him the needle.”

“C’mon, Sarge, you know he’s innocent. He’s just being railroaded by the system.”

“Innocent. If he’s innocent, the Pope ain’t Catholic. Nobody you represent is innocent.”

As I started to walk past Sarge toward the elevator, he grabbed me by the arm. His gnarled fingers dug deep into my bicep.

“You know what I’d like to see?” he said. “I’d like to see that sorry son of a biscuit eater hanged on a flatbed truck right out here in front of the courthouse, that’s what I’d like to see. I’d buy a ticket.”

It was a sentiment prevalent in the community. Laura Neal, Johnny Wayne’s wife and victim, was guilty of nothing more than picking a bad husband. She was a third-grade teacher with a wonderful reputation, her parents were solid and hardworking, and her brother was a college professor. People wanted to see Johnny Wayne burned at the stake, and I had the feeling most of them wouldn’t have minded seeing his lawyer go up in flames with him.

I pulled away from Sarge and headed up the side stairwell to the second floor. There were about a dozen people milling around in the hallway outside the courtroom, speaking in hushed tones. The hallway was dimly lit and narrow. I never noticed any color in the corridor outside the courtroom. Everything always seemed black and white, like I was walking onto the set of “Twelve Angry Men.”

I stepped into Judge Ivan Glass’s courtroom and looked around. No judge. No bailiff. No clerk.

“Where’s His Holiness?” I asked Lisa Mays, the assistant district attorney who had been assigned to prosecute Johnny Wayne. She was sitting at the prosecution table contemplating her fingernails.

“Back in chambers. He’s not in a good mood.”

Glass had been a notorious drinker and womanizer for more than three decades. He’d been divorced twice, primarily because of his affinity for younger women, but the good people of the First Judicial District didn’t seem to mind. They elected him every eight years. Glass’s father had been a judge, and his father before him. To hear Glass tell it, the bench was his birthright. He was known among the defense bar as Ivan the Terrible because of his complete lack of compassion for criminal defendants and because he treated defense attorneys almost as badly as he treated their clients. I got off on the wrong foot with him right out of law school. The first day I was in his courtroom he put an old man in jail because the man couldn’t afford to pay his court costs. I knew what the judge was doing was illegal-debtor’s prisons were outlawed a long time ago-but he seemed to do whatever he wanted regardless of the law. I did some research and found Glass had been doing it for years. I wrote him a letter and asked him to stop. He wrote back and told me young lawyers ought to mind their own business. So I sued the county for allowing one of their employees, the judge, to commit constitutional violations during the course of his employment. By the time I was done, the county had to pay out nearly a million dollars to people Glass had jailed illegally, and Glass was seriously embarrassed in the process. He hated me for it, and one of the ways he exacted vengeance was by appointing me to cases like Johnny Wayne Neal’s.

The courtroom was tense and somber. The media vultures had already filled the jury box. James and Rita Miller, Johnny Wayne’s in-laws, were sitting on the front row. Rita was crying. James looked away when I tried to catch his eye.

I walked over to the defense table to wait for the judge, who finally teetered through the door in his black robe a half-hour later. His hair was snow white, medium length and chaotic. He wore tinted reading glasses that made it difficult to see his eyes. His clerk helped him up the steps and into his chair.

The clerk called the case, and the bailiffs brought Johnny Wayne in through a door to my right and led him to the podium ten feet in front of the judge. I stood at the podium next to my client while the judge went through a lengthy question and answer session to ensure that Johnny Wayne was competent to enter a guilty plea, that he understood what was going on, and that he wasn’t under the influence of alcohol or drugs. Lisa Mayes, the prosecutor, then stood and read the litany of evidence that would have been presented had Johnny Wayne gone to trial. I could hear Rita Miller sobbing uncontrollably behind me as she was forced, one last time, to listen to a detailed description of her daughter’s brutal murder while her grandson hid beneath the bed. I felt ashamed to be representing the man who had caused her such misery.

When Lisa was finished, Judge Glass stiffened. “Johnny Wayne Neal,” he said in a voice made gravelly from booze and tobacco, “how do you plead to the charge of first-degree murder?”

The moment of truth. The point of no return.

“Guilty,” came the answer, barely audible. I breathed a sigh of relief.

“On your plea of guilty the court finds you guilty and sentences you to life in prison without the possibility of parole.”

Glass then lowered his glasses to the end of his nose and leaned forward. His eyes bored into Johnny Wayne.

“Just for the record,” the judge said, “I want to tell you something before they trot you off to the penitentiary for the rest of your miserable existence. In all my years on the bench, you are, without question, the most disgusting, the most cowardly, the most pitiful excuse for a human being that has ever set foot in my court. There isn’t an ounce of remorse in you, and I want you to know that it would have been my distinct pleasure to sentence you to death if you’d had the courage to go to trial.”

Johnny Wayne’s head rose slowly, and he met the judge’s gaze.

“Go to hell,” he said quietly.

Glass’s eyes widened. “What did you say?”

“I said you can go to hell. You, and the district attorney, and the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, and this pathetic excuse for a lawyer you dumped on me, and everybody else who had a hand in framing me.” The words spilled out in a crescendo. By the time he finished, his voice was echoing off the walls.

There was a stunned silence. The judge surprised me by smiling. He turned his head to me.

“Not only is your client a coward, Mr. Dillard, he’s a stupid coward.”

“Go to hell!” Johnny Wayne yelled.

“Bailiffs!” Judge Glass roared. He half-rose from his seat, like a jockey on a thoroughbred, and pointed his gavel at Johnny Wayne.

“Take him out and gag him!”

They were on him in a second. Two of them took him down and another two jumped into the fray. I could hear the cameras clicking and people gasping as I moved out of the way. Johnny Wayne was screaming obscenities as they punched and kicked at him. The bailiffs finally got enough control so they could drag Johnny Wayne across the floor by his feet and out the door. I sat down at the defense table and wondered briefly whether I should be offended that Johnny Wayne had called me a pathetic excuse for a lawyer. I was a pathetic excuse for a human being, maybe, but I was a pretty darned good lawyer.

Everybody sat around stupidly for a few minutes until finally the bailiffs, now in a tight phalanx, dragged Johnny Wayne back into the room. They’d stuffed something into his mouth and covered it with duct tape. I wondered how it was going to feel when they ripped the tape off his neatly trimmed beard. They pulled him upright at the podium in front of the judge.

“Mr. Neal,” Judge Glass said, “your little outburst caused me to briefly consider rescinding your plea agreement and forcing you to go to trial. But I think this punishment is more appropriate for a man like you. You’re going to die in jail, but before you die, I think you have plenty to look forward to. A handsome young man like you, with a pretty potty mouth like yours, will undoubtedly enjoy tremendous popularity in the general population at the penitentiary. I’m sure you’ll be a favorite among the sodomites. The sentence stands. Life without parole. Get him out of here.”

My last image of Johnny Wayne was of his being dragged backwards across the floor, refusing to walk, tears streaming down his face and onto the silver tape stretched across his mouth. The worst part of it for him, though, had to be the fact that his jumpsuit had become terribly wrinkled during the fight with the guards.

I ducked out through a side door to avoid the media, went down the stairs, and headed back through the security station. Sarge was going through a woman’s purse. As I walked by, he handed her the purse and headed straight for me.

“Hey, Dillard, you hear about the murder?”

“What murder?”

“They found some guy in a room up at the Budget Inn stabbed to death. Somebody cut his man parts off. A cat found it this morning out by the lake.”

“I didn’t do it, Sarge,” I said. “I’m innocent.” I kept on walking, but I could hear him laughing.

“Maybe you’ll get to defend the killer,” I heard him say. “Yeah, maybe the killer’ll be just like ol’ Johnny Wayne. Railroaded by the system.”

April 12

10:00 a.m.

Special Agent Phillip Landers’s cell phone rang a little before 10:00 a.m., just as he was wrapping his mouth around a breakfast burrito at Sonic. Bill Wright, the Special Agent in Charge of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation office in Johnson City, was calling. Bill was Landers’s boss. Not that the brown-nosing jerk should have been the boss. Landers should have been the boss. By his own account, he was, by far, the smartest, hardest-working, best-looking TBI agent in the office. He knew he’d get his chance soon, though. Wright was about to retire.

“There’s a body at the Budget Inn,” Wright said as Landers chewed slowly and stared at a teenage waitress on a pair of roller skates. “Male. Stabbed to death. That’s about all I know. I already called forensics. They’re on the way.”

The Johnson City police didn’t have any forensics people on the payroll, so murders were often passed along to the TBI. Landers took his time finishing his burrito. No big rush. The guy was already dead.

There were six city cruisers in the Budget Inn parking lot when Landers pulled in a half-hour after he got the call. All of the cruisers had their emergency lights on, as though the cops who drove them were actually doing something. The patrol guys never ceased to amaze Landers. They’d stand around for hours at a crime scene, trading gossip and hoping for some little tidbit of information they could share with each other. If they were really lucky, maybe they’d get a glimpse of the body and could go home and tell their wives or girlfriends the gory details.

Landers opened the trunk, lifted out a couple pairs of latex gloves, and walked up the stairs to Room 201. It was overcast and drizzling outside, but it still took his eyes a second to adjust to the dim light in the room. As soon as he cleared the door, he could smell blood. His eyes moved to the left. Jimmy Brown, a big, dim cracker with a butch haircut who had worked his way up through patrol and was finally, after twenty years, an investigator with the Johnson City police, was leaning over the bed. Beneath him was the body of what appeared to be a male whale. A very pale male whale. He was buck naked, lying flat on his back. His legs were splayed and his arms went straight out from his shoulders. Spread-eagled. He was covered in dark, dried blood.

“So much for death with dignity, huh?” Landers said.

Brown looked at him deadpan. He didn’t even smile. How could he not smile? That was funny. Landers chalked it up to petty jealousy.

“Where’s the forensics team?” Brown said.

“On the way. Should be here in an hour or so.” The TBI’s East Tennessee forensics guys and girls scrambled out of Knoxville, ninety miles to the west. They were responsible for covering the entire eastern half of the state. Landers knew they’d show up in their fancy modern mobile crime scene van dressed in their cute little white uniforms. Thanks to the CSI television shows, they all thought they were stars.

“Who’s the pretty boy?” Landers said.

Brown stepped back away from the body and pulled out his notepad.

“Signed in as John Paul Tester and gave a Newport address, confirmed by registration in the glove compartment of his car. His wallet’s gone, if he had one. Manager says he checked in late yesterday afternoon, said he was here to preach at a revival, and asked where he could get a good hamburger. The manager told him to go to the Purple Pig. We’re getting a driver’s license photo from the Department of Safety so we can take it down there and ask around.”

Landers wondered why Brown needed the notepad to impart such a brief summary. The guy was really thick. Landers began to walk around the bed, looking at the dead whale. There were dozens of stab wounds, most of them concentrated around the neck and chest.

“Preacher, huh? Looks like somebody didn’t like the sermon.”

“That’s the least of it,” Brown said. “His dick’s gone.”

“Really?” Landers hadn’t noticed with all the blood. He looked between the whale’s legs and there was nothing but a mess of dark red goo. Whoever cut it off had to work for it. Landers figured it had been quite a while since the whale had seen his own dick.

“And get this,” Brown said. “Some woman called the sheriff’s department this morning. She lives out by Pickens Bridge, and her cat brought her a little gift. Turned out to be a human penis. Probably belongs to this guy.”

His logic was astounding. “Any idea how long he’s been dead?” Landers said.

“He’s cold and stiff. I’d say more than eight hours.”

“Security cameras?”

“Just at the front desk. Nothing in the parking lot or anywhere else.”

A patrol officer knocked and walked in. He was carrying an eight-by-ten photo of the dead guy. He handed it to Brown, who handed it to Landers.

“Are you here to help or are you just sightseeing?” Brown said.

“Your wish is my command, at least until the case officially gets dropped in my lap.”

Brown gave him a dour look. “Why don’t you take this down to the Purple Pig and ask around?”

“Done,” Landers said. “Anything else?”

“I don’t think so. I’ve got people running down the woman who was on duty last night, canvassing the rooms, and working the Newport angle. You say forensics is on the way. I think we’ve got it under control for now.”

“Cool. I’m off to the Pig.”

Landers walked down the steps, past the patrol guys, and got into his car. He recognized a reporter from the Johnson City paper loitering outside the entrance. Her name was Sylvia something. She wasn’t gorgeous, but she wasn’t hideous, so Landers got back out of the car and went over to chat with her for a couple of minutes. He leaked her a little tidbit about the missing penis, thinking it might be worth a roll in the hay somewhere down the line.

As he made his way south down Roan Street, Landers kept glancing at the photo of the dead preacher. He had reddish hair, semi-decent features, and wide sideburns that ran to the bottom of his ear lobes, a la Elvis Presley. Not a bad-looking dude, but certainly not in the same league as Landers.

“What’d you do to get yourself killed, Rev?” Landers said to the photo as he turned into the parking lot at the Purple Pig. “Dip the old wick in a vat of bad wax?”

April 12

10:20 a.m.

Caroline Dillard, wearing a sharp, dark blue Calvin Klein knock-off suit, took a deep breath, straightened her back, and strode up to the reception desk. Behind the bullet-proof window sat a dour, pudgy, middle-aged man with a dark widow’s peak crew cut and a jaw full of tobacco. He was seated, wearing a black pullover shirt with a stitched badge on the chest. Beneath the badge, also stitched, were the words “Washington County Corrections.” As Caroline approached, he spit brown tobacco juice into a Styrofoam cup.

Caroline picked up the sign-in sheet and smiled. “I need to see inmate number 7740,” she said. No one at the Washington County Detention Center seemed to have a name. Everything was tracked by number.

The officer leered. “Got an ID, pretty lady?”

“My name is Caroline Dillard,” she said. It was only Caroline’s third visit to the detention center, and she hadn’t encountered this particular officer on either of the other two occasions. She reached into her purse, pulled out a driver’s license, and slid it into the metal tray at the bottom of the window.

“You a lawyer?” he said.

“I’m a paralegal for Joe Dillard.”

“You his wife?”

“I am.”

“You’re too pretty to be married to him.”

Caroline sighed. “If you’ll check the approved list, you’ll find my name.”

The officer opened a spiral notebook next to him and took his time searching the pages.

“I can smell you through the window,” he said. “You smell good.”

“I’ll be sure to tell your boss you like the way I smell.” Caroline looked at the name stitched opposite his badge. “Officer Cagle? The sheriff comes to our house every year for a Christmas party. He and I have gotten to be pretty good friends.” It was a lie. The sheriff had never set foot in Caroline’s home, but it seemed to have the desired effect.

Officer Cagle looked down and slid the ID back through the window.

“You know the way to the attorney’s room, ma’am?”

Caroline nodded and smiled.

“I’ll buzz you through.”

Caroline quickly made her way through the maze of gates and steel doors. She was a little anxious about the visit, because she never knew what kind of mood the inmate she was about to see would be in. The woman had been in jail for nine months, by far the longest stretch she’d ever done. She’d stolen her own mother’s checkbook, forged a check, and used the money to buy cocaine. Caroline’s husband, Joe, had represented her. He’d talked the prosecutor into reducing the charge from a felony to a misdemeanor, but because of the woman’s long history of problems with the law, in exchange for the reduction the prosecutor had insisted that she forego probation and agree to serve her sentence in the county jail.

Five minutes after Caroline sat down in the attorney’s room, a female guard opened the door and stepped back to let the inmate inside. There were no handcuffs, waist chains, or shackles. The inmate wasn’t dangerous. There was no risk of escape, because she was getting out in a few hours. She smiled slightly and nodded when she saw Caroline.

Caroline rose from her seat and opened her arms. “How are you?” she said.

“I’m fine,” the woman said, guardedly returning the hug.

“You look great.”

“You look pretty great yourself.”

They both sat down and Caroline smiled at her sister-in-law, Sarah Dillard.

Caroline was always struck by the features her husband and his older sister shared. Both of them had thick dark hair, green eyes, pristine white teeth, and lean, sturdy bodies. Sarah’s only visible flaw was a tiny pink scar that cut like a lightning bolt through her left eyebrow, the result of a punch from a drug dealer the last time she was on the street. She had high cheekbones, a strong jaw, and a cleft chin. Joe had told Caroline that he and Sarah were often mistaken for twins when they were kids. The comparisons stopped when Joe began to grow to six-foot-three and approached two hundred muscular pounds. Caroline also marveled at the resilience of Sarah’s appearance. She had a fresh beauty that made it hard to believe she’d been abusing herself with drugs and alcohol for years.

“I was wondering if you’d made a decision on what we talked about last week,” Caroline said.

Sarah looked down at the table. “I’m not too hot on it if you want to know the truth.”

“Why not?”

“I’m too old to live with my brother, Caroline. I’m too old to be living with you. I appreciate what you’re trying to do, but I think I’d be better off making my own way.”

Caroline looked hard into the green eyes for a long moment.

“So you’re going to make your own way. Like you have for the past twenty years?”

“Oh, now, that hurt. Please tell me you didn’t come all the way down here just to insult me.”

“I came all the way down here to try to talk some sense into that thick head of yours. If you don’t come stay with us, where are you going to go? What are you going to do?”

“I have friends.”

“What kind of friends? Dealers and users? You need to stay away from those people.”

“Yeah?” The green eyes flashed, but Caroline held her gaze. “What I don’t need is a lecture from my brother’s wife. Why are you doing this, anyway? Why isn’t Joe here?”

Caroline leaned forward on her elbows. “I’m doing this because I care about you. We both care about you. We just want to try to help. And Joe isn’t here because he can’t stand to see you in this place again. It tears him up.”

“Seeing me in here tears him up? He ought to try living in here for a while. It’d give him some compassion for his clients.”

“He has plenty of compassion for his clients, especially you. He’s done everything he could possibly do for you, including sending you money every month.”

“I’ll be sure to send him a thank-you note when I get out.”

“Why do you have to be so cynical, Sarah? Why can’t you believe that somebody could care enough about you to want to help? That’s all it is. There aren’t any strings attached.”

“No strings? What if I feel like getting high tomorrow night?”

“I said there weren’t any strings. But there will be rules. If any of us sees one sign of drugs or booze, you’re out the door.”

Sarah smiled. “And there it is. We’ll love you Sarah unless you do what you’ve always done. If you do that, we won’t love you any more.”

“We’ll still love you. We just won’t help you destroy yourself.”

“No thanks.” Sarah rose from the chair and moved to the wall to push the button that summoned the guard.

“So that’s it? No thanks?”

“That’s it.”

“Fine.” Caroline got up from her chair and moved to the opposite door. Both women stood in uncomfortable silence, facing away from each other, until the guard appeared.

“The offer stays open,” Caroline said as Sarah walked out of the room. “All you have to do is show up.”

April 12

11:15 a.m.

Agent Landers knew there’d be some added pressure to make an arrest because the dead guy was a preacher. Not that there wouldn’t have been pressure to find out who killed him if he’d been a plumber or a bartender. But preachers still had a special place in the hearts and minds of most upper east Tennesseans. Killing a man of God was an insult to the Almighty Himself.

The Purple Pig was a small, popular burger and beer joint about a mile from East Tennessee State University. It was like one of those English pubs-same people, sitting in the same places, telling the same old jokes, drinking the same kind of beer. Landers ate lunch there two or three times a month. Every now and then he’d stop in and have a beer after work. He went to high school with the owners, and he knew several of the regulars and the waitresses. Especially the waitresses. Landers had phone numbers for all of them, even the ones who were married. “Skilled with the ladies,” was how he referred to himself.

He parked his Ford in the lot, picked up the photo of Tester, and jogged up to the door. He could smell the grease as soon as he got out of the car. The Pig wasn’t open for breakfast, but there were cars in the lot. He knew the employees were prepping for the lunch rush, so he knocked on the locked front door. Patti Gillespie opened it. Patti was a cute little brunette, barely over five feet tall. She and her brother Sonny owned the place. Landers had banged a drunken Patti once in the girls bathroom during a basketball game back in high school. He’d wanted to know what a small girl felt like.

“I need to talk to you,” Landers said, and she led him inside. He plunked down on the first bar stool he came to. The place was dark and smelled of stale cigarette smoke and animal fat. A mirror ran the length of a long wall opposite the bar. Landers checked himself out as Patti walked around the bar and back toward him. He liked what he saw.

“What’s the difference between a sperm cell and a TBI agent?” she said. Patti loved to bust his chops.

“Go ahead, slay me,” Landers said. “What’s the difference between a sperm cell and a TBI agent?”

“A sperm cell has a one in a million chance of becoming a human being. Can I get you something to drink?”

“A Pepsi, and I have a photograph I want you to look at. Do you mind?”

“Are you doing real police work?”

“I am.”

“Hey, Lottie,” Patti called toward the kitchen. “Special Agent Phillip Landers here is doing real police work in my little old bar. He wants me to help him. What should I do?”

“Deny everything,” a voice called back. “Ask for a lawyer.”

“She doesn’t like you,” Patti said. “She says you have a small penis.”

“You know better than that,” Landers said with a wink.

“I was drunk, jerkoff. I don’t remember your penis.”

Landers slid the photo of Tester onto the bar. “Any chance this guy was in here yesterday evening?”

Patti nodded. “Came in about six, sat right over there in that booth.” She pointed behind Landers. “I waited on him. Ordered a cheeseburger and fries. Drank two Blue Ribbons. Nobody drinks Blue Ribbon any more. I remember thinking he wouldn’t have looked too bad if he lost some weight and shaved those goofy sideburns.”

“I don’t think he’ll be shaving any time soon. He’s dead.”

Patti gasped. “You kidding me?”

“Dead as dirt. Got himself killed last night. Any chance he hooked up with somebody in here? Did you see him leave?”

“Sonny was working the register when he left. He didn’t leave with anybody, but he asked Sonny about the Mouse’s Tail.”

“Really? Tell me more.”

“He was a little creepy, you know? A little too cocky for his own good with that big belly and that cheap suit. When he paid his bill he asked Sonny where he could find some adult entertainment, a place where they showed it all. Sonny told me about it after he left. He thought it was funny. He said the only way that dude would get any was to pay for it.”

“Mouse’s Tail, huh? Thanks, Patti. After all these years, I’m finally gonna put you on my Christmas card list.”

“Whoa, now, wait just one minute,” Patti said. “I need details. Tell me something juicy.”

“Sorry, can’t do it right now. I’m sure you’ll hear all about it on the news.”

“Just like a man. Always wanting something for nothing.”

Landers turned to leave without offering to pay. “Thanks for the Pepsi,” he said, “and thanks for the information. I’ll come back and tell you about it later.”

“I’m holding you to that,” she said. Landers looked in the mirror as he started out the door and saw Patti blow him a kiss. “That man has a fine butt, Lottie,” he heard her say.

“Screw him,” Lottie said. “He’s a fag.”

Lottie was pretty good, but once Landers did her a few times, he dumped her. He had to. There were a lot of other women out there who wanted to be with him. He figured he owed it to all of them to stay unattached.

April 12

11:45 a.m.

A horny preacher. A man after Landers’s own heart.

Landers called Jimmy Brown, told him about the lead and that he was going out to the Mouse’s Tail. Brown said they’d found one witness, the night clerk at the motel, who said she thought she saw a woman go up toward Tester’s room around midnight. The forensics van had showed up. Maybe they’d find something.

Brown said Tester was an evangelist, a traveling preacher from Newport, which was located in Cocke County about sixty miles to the southwest of Johnson City. Newport was infamous in the law enforcement community for three things: chop shops, marijuana production, and especially cock fighting. Landers had also heard some of the preachers down there were snake-handlers, religious extremists who proved their faith by waving copperheads and rattlesnakes around while they delivered their sermons. He wondered whether the dead rev liked to play with slimy serpents.

He pulled into the parking lot at the Mouse’s Tail just before noon and circled the building. There was only one vehicle in the back, a black BMW convertible. A redheaded woman was just getting out. She was wearing black leather pants and a tight cheetah print top and was having a hard time walking through the gravel in her three-inch spiked heels. The outfit was definitely on the outrageous side, but her body was good enough to pull it off.

Landers pulled up beside the BMW, got out, introduced himself, and showed the woman his identification. She shook his hand and said her name was Erlene Barlowe. She owned the place. Said her husband passed away a while back and she took over after he died. She had a pretty face and was wearing a push-up bra that pushed up plenty. But she had to be at least fifty, so Landers figured the bright red hair was bottle-fed.

“What can I do for you, honey?” she said after a little small talk.

“What time do you open?” Landers was disappointed that the place was closed, since he wanted to talk to some of the employees. Actually, he was hoping to get to see some of her employees in action. He’d heard the Mouse’s Tail was a pretty steamy place, but he’d never been in there. When Landers wanted to go to a strip club, he went to Myrtle Beach or Atlanta. As much as he liked to look at live, naked women, he knew the TBI would probably fire him if they heard he was hanging out at the local titty bar. Those kinds of places were notorious for drugs.

“Five,” the woman said. “We’re open five to two, six days a week. Closed on Sundays.” Her voice was kind of southern belleish, not exactly what he expected to hear from a woman who looked like her, with a syrupy Tennessee drawl. Landers thought it was nice that the titty bar observed the Sabbath.

“So you were open last night?”

“Wednesday’s usually a pretty good night for us. It’s hump day, you know.”

She had a little smile on her face when she said “hump day.” Landers wondered how much humping went on in there on hump day.

“Was it crowded last night?”

“Wasn’t anything special, sugar. Do you mind if I ask why you’re asking?”

As she talked, Landers noticed her mouth. Nice teeth, and candy apple red liptstick. Looked like a color you’d paint a ’56 Chevy.

“Just doing my job, Ms. Barlowe,” he said. “Obviously, I wouldn’t be here unless I was working some kind of an investigation.”

“I understand completely,” she said, “but I’m sure you can understand that I’m concerned when a police officer, even one as handsome as yourself, shows up at my place of business asking questions. Maybe I could help you a little more if you’d let me in on what you’re investigating.”

Landers stepped back over to his car, reached in, and picked the photograph of Tester up off the front seat.

“Were you here last night?” he said.

“I’m here every night, sweetie.”

“Recognize this guy?” Landers handed the photo to her. She looked at it for a few seconds, then shook her head and handed it back.

“I don’t believe I do.”

“I think he was here last night.”

“Really? What would make you think that?”

“Just some information I picked up. He was killed last night.”

She gasped and covered her mouth. “Oh, my goodness. That’s terrible!”

Landers held the photo up in front of her face again. “You’re absolutely certain you didn’t see him in your club last night?”

“Well, now, I don’t believe I could say for certain. Lots and lots of men come and go. I don’t notice all of them.”

“I’m going to need to interview the employees who were working last night and as many of your customers as I can.”

“Well, I swan,” she said. “You’ll scare my girls to death. And the customers? Honey, they’d run from you like scared rabbits. Most of them don’t even want their wives to know they’ve been here, let alone the police. If you were to come in here and start asking them about a murder, why, I just don’t know what would happen to my business.”

“I didn’t say anything about a murder.”

The phony smile she was wearing stayed frozen on her face, but her eyes tightened the slightest bit. At that moment, Landers knew she realized she’d fallen face first into a pile of dung. It didn’t surprise Landers. Any woman who dressed like that had to be stupid.

“I thought you said the man was killed,” she said.

“I did, but I didn’t say he was murdered. I didn’t say anything about how he was killed. He might have been run over by a train or gotten killed in a car wreck. He could have jumped off a building or blown his brains out. What makes you think he was murdered?”

“I don’t claim to know a whole lot, honey, but I didn’t think the TBI got involved with car wrecks. I thought they only sent you boys in for the bad stuff.”

Nice try. She knew something, and now that she’d screwed up, she was trying to back-pedal. Landers decided to try to get her out of her element and into his, get her to a place where she’d be less comfortable.

“Ms. Barlowe, let’s you and I go down to my office where we can sit down, have a cup of coffee, and talk. You can give me a list of your employees and the names of as many customers from last night as you can remember, and I’ll have you back here in a couple of hours.”

The smile vanished.

“Honey, did I mention to you that my late husband, God rest his soul, used to be the sheriff of McNairy County? I was his personal secretary for almost a year before he resigned, and then we got married about a year after that. It was a long time ago, but I remember a few things about the law. Now I don’t mean to be rude to you, sugar, but one of the things I remember is that unless you have some kind of warrant or unless you arrest me, I don’t believe I even have to talk to you. I’ve tried to be nice up to this point, but you’ve made it clear that you think I’ve done something wrong. So you know what? I think I’m just going to go on inside and get to work now, okay? You have yourself a wonderful day.”

She turned around and sashayed off. It was the only word to describe the way her hips swayed as she headed into the Mouse’s Tail on her spike heels. Landers stood there watching her for a minute, then turned and got back into his car.

Most people cringe when they talk to TBI agents, and almost all of them cooperate unless they have something to hide. This woman had something to hide. Landers decided to stick a flashlight up her skirt until he found out what it was.

April 12

12:10 p.m.

I went up to see my mother after Johnny Wayne was carted off. It was lunchtime, and walking down the hall in the long-term-care wing at the nursing home was like running a wheelchair gauntlet. I knocked gently on the door and walked in. She was awake. It seemed she was always awake. The doctors told me that Alzheimer’s, as it progresses, interferes with sleep patterns. She was sitting up in bed, watching Sportscenter. Baseball season had started, which meant her beloved Atlanta Braves were back on the field.

“Hi, Ma. How’re you feeling today?”

“Like I’ve been hit by a train.”

“Good. At least you’re with us.”

The disease was steadily running its course. One day I’d walk in and she’d say “Hi, Joe,” and we’d talk for a little while, and the next day she wouldn’t even know my name. It was painful to watch. She was only sixty years old, and she’d always been strong and vital. But her skin had lost its elasticity and was the color of bleached bone. Her weight had dropped to ninety pounds, and she seemed to have shrunk by at least two inches. Her cheeks were hollow, her hazel eyes dull, and her hair gray and stringy. Her teeth were in a jar on the bedside table. As I sat down in the chair next to her bed, I knew it wouldn’t be long before she wouldn’t be able to talk at all.

Ma was born in 1947 in a small town called Erwin, Tennessee, which is in the Appalachians not far from the North Carolina border and is surrounded by the Cherokee National Forest. She fell in love with a football star from nearby Johnson City and married him in 1964, a month after they graduated from high school. She had Sarah in 1966 and me in 1967, after my father was drafted and went off to Vietnam. I never laid eyes on my father; he was shipped home in a body bag by the time I was born.

Ma provided for my sister and me as best she could by working as a bookkeeper for a small roofing company and taking in other people’s laundry. She didn’t talk much, and when she did, it was usually a bitter tirade against Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon. She never dated another man and hardly ever left the house. Her only real requirement of me was: “Get an education, Joey.”

“Sarah’s getting out of jail today,” I said. “I hope she’s going to stay at my house for a while. Caroline was supposed to go down and talk to her sometime this morning.”

Her eyes dropped at the mention of Sarah and she began to shake her head.

“My own flesh and blood in jail,” she said. “Tell me where I went wrong.”

“No sense in beating yourself up over it. She is what she is. It isn’t your fault.”

“You better lock up your valuables, Joey. She’ll haul the whole house off if you give her the chance.”

“Sarah wouldn’t steal from me, Ma.” In fact, Sarah had stolen from me in the past, but I’d never told Ma about it.

“Well, she stole from me, plenty of times.”

“Maybe she’s changed. You looked sad when I came in. What’s the matter?”

“I was thinking about Raymond.” She reached for a tissue beside the bed and dabbed at her eyes. Raymond was Ma’s younger brother. He drowned at the age of seventeen. “Such a waste.”

“No it wasn’t,” I said before I realized what was coming out of my mouth. ”Don’t spend any tears on him, Ma. That’s a waste.”

“Joey, you’ve never had a kind word to say about your uncle. What did Raymond ever do to you?”

I shook my head, not wanting to get into it. She hadn’t mentioned him in years. “He wasn’t a good person.”

“He just needed-“

“Ma, could we please not talk about Raymond? You’re entitled to your opinion, I’m entitled to mine.”

I wanted to tell her what my opinion was based on but I didn’t see the point. It had happened so long ago, and Ma was dying. I didn’t see the sense in sullying whatever pleasant memories she had of her only brother.

I managed to get her mind off of Raymond and onto my son Jack’s baseball prospects for a little while, but then, like a sudden change in the weather, she looked at me as though she’d never seen me before.

“What are you doing here?” she said. “Who are you?” It was a fast transformation, even for her, like some inner switch had been flipped. Even the pitch in her voice changed.

“It’s me, Ma. I’m Joe. Your son.”

“Why are you wearing that tie? You some kind of big cheese or something?”

“No, Ma. I’m not a big cheese.”

“Where’s Raymond?”

“Raymond’s dead.”

She let out a long sigh and stared at the ceiling.

“Ma? Can you hear me?”

She didn’t respond. She lay motionless, almost catatonic. I looked over at the bedside dresser. On top of it were several photos of our fractured family. There was one of my grandfather, wearing bib overalls and following a plow pulled by a mule through a cornfield. There was a framed photograph of me walking across the stage at my law school graduation ceremony. Next to it, in a smaller frame, was a black-and-white of Sarah and me when I was seven years old. We were standing on a plank raft in the middle of a half-acre pond out back of my grandparents’ home. Both of us were grinning from ear to ear. Two of my front teeth were missing.

Just to the right of that photo was a slightly larger one of Uncle Raymond, taken about six months before he died. He was seventeen years old, standing next to a doe that had been shot, hung from a tree limb, and gutted. He held a rifle in his left hand and a cigarette in his right. I walked over and picked up the photo. I looked at it for a minute, then turned back toward the bed. Ma was still staring at the ceiling.

“Can you hear me?” I said.

Nothing.

I sat back down on the chair next to the bed and began to dismantle the picture frame. I pried the small staples loose on the back of the frame, pulled the photo out, and tore it into little pieces.

“Hope you don’t mind too much, Ma, but I’m going to put Raymond where he belongs.” I walked to the bathroom, dropped the pieces in the toilet, flushed it, and watched them swirl around the bowl and disappear.

I went to her bedside and sat down again. I leaned back, closed my eyes, and tried to compose myself, the mention of Raymond’s name still ringing in my ears. Finally, I sat up straight.

“Since you can’t hear me anyway, I’m going to tell you what he did,” I said. “At least it’ll give me the chance to finally get it off my chest.”

I leaned forward, rested my elbows on my knees, and clasped my hands.

“I was eight years old. Sarah was nine. You and Grandma and Grandpa had gone out — it was a Friday evening — and you left Sarah and me at Grandma’s house with Raymond. He was sixteen, I think.

“I remember watching a baseball game on TV. I must have dozed off, because when I woke up, it was dark. The only light in the house was from the television screen. I remember sitting up and rubbing my eyes, and then I heard this noise. It scared me, because it sounded like a cry for help, but I got up off of the couch and started walking toward the noise, more scared every step I took. I was tiptoeing.

“As I got closer, I could make out some words, something like ‘No! Stop it!’ I knew it was Sarah’s voice, coming from Uncle Raymond’s bedroom. I pushed the door open just a little and I could make out Uncle Raymond in the lamplight. He was naked on his knees in the bed with his back to me. Sarah’s voice was coming from underneath him.”

I stopped and took a deep breath, the image of my naked uncle looming over my sister burning in my mind’s eye. “Can you hear me, Ma?” I said. “Are you getting this?” I noticed my voice was shaky. Ma was still staring at the ceiling.

“Sarah kept saying, ‘It hurts. Stop it!’ I didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t know anything about sex. But there was so much pain, so much fear in Sarah’s voice that I knew it was bad. I finally managed to say, ‘What’s going on?’ I remember being surprised that my voice worked.

“Raymond’s head snapped around and he looked at me like he was going to kill me. He said, ‘Get out of here, you little twerp.’ I asked him what he was doing to Sarah. And then, Ma, right then, Sarah said something that haunts me to this day. I’ll never forget that little voice. She said, ‘Get him off of me, Joey. He’s hurting me.’”

I had to stop for a minute. The rape of my sister had haunted me, and her, for more than three decades. When I started talking to Ma, I thought it might somehow help to finally describe to another human being — even a human being who couldn’t take it in — what had happened to Sarah. But talking about it was transporting me back to that tiny bedroom. I could feel my heart pounding inside my chest and my hands had become cold and clammy.

“I stood there like an idiot for a second trying to figure out what to do, but Raymond didn’t give me a chance. He jumped off the bed and grabbed me by the throat. He slammed my head so hard against the wall that it made me dizzy. Then he picked me up by the collar and threw me out the door. I remember skidding along down the hallway on my stomach. He slammed the door, and I froze. I thought about going out to the garage to get a baseball bat or a shovel or an axe, anything. I could hear Sarah crying on the other side of the door, but it was like one of those nightmares where your arms and legs won’t work. I was too scared to move.

“Finally, after what seemed like forever, they came out of the room. I remember Sarah sniffling and wiping her nose with the back of her hand. Raymond grabbed both of us by the back of the neck, dragged us into the living room, and pushed us onto the couch. He bent down close to us and pointed his finger within an inch of my nose. And then your brother, the one you loved so much, said to me, ‘If you say one word about this to anybody, I’ll kill your sister.’ Then he turns to Sarah and says, ‘And if you say anything, I’ll kill your brother. Got it?’

“Neither one of us ever said a word to anyone, including each other. When that sorry piece of trash drowned a year later, it was one of the best days of my life. I tried to get him out of my mind after that, but I couldn’t do it. Obviously, neither could Sarah.”

I sat back in the chair and let out a deep sigh. “So now you know.”

She hadn’t moved since I started talking. She lay there, barely breathing, staring at nothing, blinking occasionally.

“I can’t believe you didn’t notice the changes after that day. I can’t believe you never even bothered to ask what was wrong. I might have told you about it, and maybe you could have done something to help Sarah. But you were too busy feeling sorry for yourself. You’ve spent your whole life being miserable, and now it’s over.”

I looked for some telltale sign that she understood. Nothing.

“Did you hear a word I just said? Did you hear? Ma? ”

There was a knock and the door opened. A nurse’s aide stepped tentatively into the room.

“Is everything all right?” she said. “I thought I heard someone shouting.”

It took a few seconds before I understood what she was saying. I suddenly realized where I was, like I’d just been awakened from a deep sleep.

“Everything’s fine,” I said. “Please close the door.”

She turned and left. I got up from the chair and looked down at Ma.

“I guess I better go now,” I said. “I’m glad we had this little talk.”

April 12

4:00 p.m.

Erlene Barlowe missed Gus more than ever. He’d have been better than her at handling the TBI agent. As soon as she got away from him in the parking lot, she sat down at the bar and asked herself what Gus would do. She was worried. The TBI man didn’t strike her as the type she could hold off for long. She knew he’d be back, and she knew it would probably be soon.

Like she told the agent, Gus had been elected high sheriff of McNairy County when he was only twenty-six years old. It was nearly thirty years ago. Erlene wasn’t much more than a baby, only twenty-two and didn’t know the first thing about the world. Her uncle on the McNairy County Commission helped her get a job as a dispatcher at the sheriff’s department. She and Gus were sweet on each other right from the get-go.

What she hadn’t told the agent was that Gus was married to another woman at the time, and his wife Bashie caught Erlene and Gus in a motel room in Gatlinburg on a Friday night. Bashie divorced Gus a few months later and he resigned from the sheriff’s department. There was also some talk that Gus was selling protection to gamblers and marijuana smugglers, but Erlene didn’t believe a word of it.

Gus met some people while he was sheriff who helped him get into the adult entertainment business in Hamilton County after he resigned. He asked Erlene to go with him, and she did. She was love-struck, and it went deep down. Gus was big and strong and handsome, a real man’s man. He treated her like a princess. They weren’t able to have children — a botched abortion at the age of sixteen had left Erlene barren — but they had a wonderful life together for almost thirty years. She and Gus owned four clubs in four different counties during their marriage. They’d either buy a club that wasn’t making a profit or build one on the cheap and start up. Gus ran the business and dealt with the customers, Erlene handled the girls. They’d make the club profitable, ride it for a while, then sell it. They took in tons of money. Along they way, they helped a lot of young girls who were in bad situations.

Erlene and Gus were planning to run the Mouse’s Tail for another five years and then move to the South Carolina coast and retire. But late last September, he’d been mowing the yard on a Sunday afternoon, keeled over, and was already dead of a coronary when Erlene found him. Her heart broke into a million tiny pieces. Her sweet Gus. He was there one minute, smiling and waving on the riding mower when she looked out the kitchen window, and then… poof! Just like that. Gone. The only thing that kept her going was the knowledge that the two of them would be together again someday. Her Gus would be waiting on the other side.

After the TBI agent left and she thought for a while, she called the bartender and all of the girls who worked the night before and told them to meet her at the bar at four o’clock, an hour before the place opened. Ronnie was the bartender. Mitzi, Elizabeth, Julie, Trisha, Heather, and Debbie were dancers. The other two were waitresses, April and Alexandra. They were all beautiful, with wonderful bodies. The older Erlene got, the more she loved being around them. She tried to teach them to respect themselves and to stay away from bad men and drugs. It was a challenge, but she did the best she could.

Angel had also waited tables the night the man was killed, but Erlene didn’t want Angel to be at the meeting. The man who was killed had behaved shamefully toward Angel, and Erlene was afraid that if the TBI man found out about it, he might suspect Angel of something. Besides, Erlene felt guilty for even having Angel working at the club. She didn’t have any way of knowing it when they first met, but Angel wasn’t the type of girl who could handle herself in a place like the Mouse’s Tail. She was just too tender.

Erlene knew some of the girls thought it was a little strange that Erlene took such a shine to Angel right from the beginning, but they didn’t understand. A lot of it was because of Gus. He had a daughter from his first marriage, a beautiful brunette named Alyse. After Gus and Erlene ran off together, Gus’s ex-wife Bashie hated him so much that he never got to see Alyse again, but he talked about wanting to see her all the time and he sent money for her every month. He’d always tell Erlene, “She’ll come some day. You wait and see.”

Sure enough, about a week after Alyse’s seventeenth birthday, Gus got a framed photograph of his daughter in the mail. There was a little note with it that said, “I miss you, daddy. I’ll see you next year after I turn eighteen.” Gus hung the photograph up right next to the kitchen door, and every time he left the house, he blew a kiss at it.

Then the most terrible thing happened. Alyse and two other teenagers were killed in a car accident on New Year’s Eve, just a few months after Gus got the picture in the mail. Gus went to her funeral, but Erlene stayed home. She didn’t think it would be proper for her to go. Gus was the saddest man Erlene had ever seen for the next few months, though he eventually came out of it and got back to being his old self again. But he never took the picture down, and he never stopped blowing kisses to Alyse. After he died, Erlene left the photograph hanging right where it was. She even started blowing kisses herself.

When Angel showed up on the bus with Julie Hayes, Erlene’s teeth near fell out of her mouth. Angel looked so much like Alyse that Erlene swore they could’ve been sisters, maybe even twins. When she first laid eyes on Angel, she heard Gus’s voice: “She’ll come some day. You wait and see. ” Erlene knew she had to take Angel home with her. It was like having a piece of Gus back in the house all over again, like Gus himself had sent Angel to comfort her. And doing things for Angel, helping her, did comfort Erlene. It was healing, that’s what it was, it helped heal some of the pain of losing Gus and a lot of what she’d carried around ever since the doctor told her she’d never be a mother.

After Angel had been with Erlene only a little while, during some of those moments when they’d curl up on the couch in front of the fireplace and watch a movie, Angel started to open up a little and told Erlene some of the terrible things that had happened to her. That’s when Erlene knew she was right. She knew Gus — or God — had sent Angel to her. She didn’t really care which. Angel was the daughter Erlene never had. She was meant to take care of her.

The girls and Ronnie showed up between four and four-fifteen. Erlene told them to sit at the bar. As soon as Julie dragged in — late, as usual — Erlene stood on the other side of the bar and gave them a little speech.

“There was a detective from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation here around noon,” she said. “He was asking about a murder. He had a picture of the man who was killed, and he thinks the man was here last night. He may even think one of us had something to do with it.”

Erlene paused for a skinny minute and looked at their faces. She set such high standards for her girls. They had to dress a certain way when they came into the club and Erlene was real particular about their makeup and the way they wore their hair. When Erlene mentioned murder, the girls’ mouths dropped open and they started looking at one another.

“Is that the murder they’ve been talking about on the radio?” Heather said. “They’re saying the man was a preacher. It made me think of that guy last night who was spouting- ”

Erlene held up her hand.

“I haven’t heard anything on the radio,” she said, “but I want all of you to forget about that man last night. He wasn’t here. I want every one of you to look at me, right now, and listen real careful to what I’m saying. He wasn’t here. When the TBI man comes back here or if he comes to your place and starts asking you questions, he’s going to show you a picture. And you’re going to tell him that the man in the picture was not here. Do all of you understand that?”

Everybody but Julie nodded. Julie looked at Erlene and said, “So you’re telling us to lie to a cop about a murder? Isn’t that illegal or something?”

Julie had become a problem again. A gorgeous, green-eyed redhead with a perfect body was great for business, but she was back on the cocaine and she was getting worse by the day. She was always late, always distracted, and she did outrageous, vulgar things sometimes when she danced.

Julie had also had a huge crush on Gus, even though he was old enough to be her granddaddy, and she was jealous of Erlene. Erlene finally had to fire her last year after she caught her snorting cocaine in one of the storage rooms. Julie made a huge, ugly scene and was hollering at the top of her lungs when she stormed out of the club. Erlene didn’t hear a word from her for eight months, and then maybe two months ago she called Erlene up, all sweet and apologetic. Julie told Erlene how sorry she was about Gus and said she was clean as a whistle and wanted to come back to work. She was in Texas at the time, and Erlene’s head told her to let Julie stay in Texas, but her heart said Julie was just a lost young girl who needed a job. The fact that she was good for business didn’t hurt, either.

“Nothing will happen if we stick together,” Erlene said, continuing her speech. “Do you girls have any idea what getting caught up in a big murder would do to this business? People would stay away from this place in droves. We’d all wind up on the street, including you, Miss Julie. All that money you’ve been making? Gone. Besides, I’m sure nobody in this room killed that gentleman, and I doubt very seriously if any of you has any information that would help the police. The man was a drunken fool. Every one of you saw the way he acted. He probably went somewhere else after he left here and ran into somebody who wasn’t as tolerant of his behavior as we were. So why do we need to get involved in it? If the detective asks you, just tell him the man wasn’t here and let him move on to people who might be able to help.”

“Where’s Angel?” Julie said. “She’s the one who waited on him.”

“Angel’s at home. She and I have decided that she’s not really cut out for this business. Don’t worry about Angel. She won’t say a word.” Erlene paused for a minute and looked at all of them again. “Girls, are we all on the same page?” She knew Ronnie was on the same page. She didn’t even look at him.

They all sat quietly, but they were nodding. Erlene knew mentioning the money they were making would get their attention, and besides, she treated them good. She expected a little loyalty in return.

“Julie?”

Julie popped her gum and shrugged her shoulders.

“All right, then, let’s get ready to go to work.”

April 12

6:00 p.m.

After I left the nursing home, I spent the next hour driving to Mountain City to stand next to a client who was entering a guilty plea to a reduced charge of negligent homicide in what had originally been a second-degree murder case. My client, a thirty-year-old man named Lester Hancock, had come home unexpectedly one evening to discover his best friend in bed with his wife. Lester had initially handled the dispute admirably. He simply told his buddy to get the hell out of his house and never come back. His friend left, but returned fifteen minutes later and began yelling insults at Lester from the road in front of Lester’s house. Lester yelled back. His friend grabbed a baseball bat from the bed of his pickup truck and started toward the house. Lester stepped out on the front porch and blew a hole in him with a black powder rifle. He wouldn’t have been charged had he not dragged the man inside his house and then lied to the police about the way things really happened.

The drive was spectacular in April. The angle of the sun caused the mountain peaks to reflect off of the shimmering water of Watauga Lake, and the mountains themselves were coming to life. Redbud and Bradford pear blossoms dotted the slopes with pink and white. As I wound slowly through the beautiful countryside, I thought about the question Ma had asked me earlier: “What did Raymond ever do to you?”

Almost immediately following the rape, I started overreacting to anyone who I perceived was trying to bully me. Over the next year, I got myself thrown out of school three times for fighting, and I was only in the third grade. I was afraid of being left alone and had nightmares regularly. The nightmares eased after a while, but then, when I was in the eighth grade and just starting to hit puberty, I threw my helmet at a football coach who grabbed my face mask and screamed at me when I made a mistake on a play during practice. The helmet hit him in the head. They threw me off the team and out of school for a month.

My freshman year in high school, during the time when the hormones were flowing and I felt like I wasn’t in control of anything, including my own body, I went days without sleep and fell into deep depressions. It was the first time I remember having the dream of floating down the turbulent river toward the waterfall.

And then, during my sophomore year, I met Caroline. She was beautiful, smart, funny and optimistic, and at first, I had a lot of trouble believing she wanted to have anything to do with me. But she did. She saw something in me that I didn’t see, and while I didn’t understand, I was grateful. She’d flash a smile at me or give me a sideways glance and wink and my heart would melt. Gradually, the nightmares stopped and over the next few years, I learned what it was like to enjoy life.

Caroline and I were inseparable all through high school. We both worked hard. I was an athlete, she was a dancer, and we were both good students. We both had part-time jobs. I worked on the weekends stocking groceries at a supermarket and she taught dance to kids at the studio where she took lessons. Caroline’s father was a long-haul truck driver who was hardly ever home and her mother was almost as emotionless as mine, but she never complained about either one of them. We had each other, and that was enough.

The only serious problem we had was around graduation time. Caroline wanted to get married — and so did I — but I had something else I wanted to do first. I had trouble explaining it to her, but I wanted to join the army and become a Ranger. Caroline said I was crazy, that I was somehow trying to forge a bond with my dead father. She was probably right, but it didn’t matter. I’d made up my mind. I enlisted a month after I graduated from high school and left for boot camp the same week Caroline entered college at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. She said she’d wait for me, and she did. I wrote to her almost every day and I came home to see her every time I went on leave, but it was the longest three years of my life.

By the time I got out of the army, Caroline had earned an undergraduate degree in liberal arts. We were married at the Methodist church her mother attended in Johnson City the same weekend I got back, and I enrolled in school at the University of Tennessee in the fall. Caroline went to work at a dance studio owned by a former Dallas Cowboy cheerleader. She taught jazz and tap and acrobatics and choreographed routines for the dance recitals. I majored in political science and knew what I wanted to be. I was going to law school and I was going to become a prosecutor. I wanted to put people like my Uncle Raymond in jail.

Marrying Caroline was the best decision I ever made. She was so beautiful, so full of life, and she taught me the most important lesson I’d ever learned — how to love. Over the next two years we had two beautiful, healthy children, and Caroline helped me learn how to raise them. She nudged me when I needed nudging, held me back when I needed holding back, and did her best to try to ease the intensity that burned in me.

Unfortunately, however, I brought more than my duffel bag home with me from the army. The Rangers are gung-ho, small-unit specialists who pride themselves on being able to fight in any environment on a moment’s notice. I trained all over the world for three years, but didn’t see any combat until two months before my enlistment expired when my unit was sent to Grenada. Terrible images from the short but bloody battles I fought there haunted me through college and law school. I’d wake up in the middle of the night screaming, covered in sweat, with my wife talking softly to me, trying to calm me down.

As with Sarah’s rape, I eventually managed to suppress the memories, at least most of the time. I even managed to make excellent grades and graduate from both college and law school, despite the fact that I always held a part-time job and was doing my best to be a good husband and father along the way. I kept myself so busy I didn’t have time to think about the past. I didn’t sleep much during that seven-year stretch.

By the time I graduated from law school, my son Jack was just entering the first grade. When I interviewed for a job at the district attorney’s office back in Washington County, I was disappointed to find that the starting salary for rookie prosecutors was less than twenty-five thousand dollars a year and that it would take me at least ten years to get to the fifty thousand dollars. It seemed like such a waste to have spent all that time and effort for such a paltry salary. Caroline was starting up her own dance studio and we knew it would take some time before she started earning a decent salary. I figured I could make at least twice what the district attorney’s office was offering by practicing on my own, even as a rookie, so I set up shop in Johnson City. I told myself that after I’d made some serious money and gained some experience, I’d close down the office and go to work as a prosecutor.

I immediately started taking criminal defense cases, reasoning that the experience would help me later when I went to the D.A.’s office. I put the same amount of sweat and effort into my law practice as I’d put into being an athlete, a soldier and a student, and I soon became very good at it. I found that the law offered a great deal of leeway to an astute and enterprising mind, and I learned to take on even the most damning evidence and spin it to suit my arguments. Within a couple of years, I started to win jury trials. The trial victories translated into publicity, and I soon became the busiest criminal defense lawyer around. The money started rolling in.

I defended murderers, thieves, drug dealers, prostitutes, white collar embezzlers, wife beaters and drunk drivers. The only cases I refused to take were sex crimes. I convinced myself that I was some kind of white knight, a trial lawyer who defended the rights of the accused against an oppressive government. And along the way, I made an unfortunate discovery. I learned that many of the police officers and prosecutors who were on the other side weren’t much different than the criminals I was defending. They didn’t care about the truth — all they cared about was winning. Still, the thought of moving to the prosecutor’s office was always on my mind. But the money kept me from it. I was taking good care of my wife and my kids. I took pride in being a provider. I took pride in being able to give my children material goods and opportunities I never had. Before I knew it, ten years had passed.

And then, along came Billy Dockery.

Billy was a thirty-year-old mama’s boy charged with killing an elderly woman after he broke into her house in the middle of the night. He was long-haired, skinny, stupid, and arrogant, and I was repelled by him from the moment we met. But he swore he was innocent, the case against him was weak, and his mother was willing to pony up a big fee, so I took his case. A year later, a jury found him not guilty after a three-day trial.

Billy showed up at my office — drunk — the day after he was acquitted. He tossed an envelope onto my desk. When I asked him what was in it, he said it was a cash bonus, five thousand dollars. I told him his mother had already paid my fee. He was giddy and insistent. I knew he didn’t have a job, so I asked him where he got the money.

“Off’n that woman,” he said.

“What woman?”

“That woman I killed. I got a bunch more’n this. I figger you earned a piece of it.”

I threw him and his money out onto the street. There wasn’t any use in telling the police about it. Double jeopardy prevented Billy from being tried again, and the rules about client confidentiality meant I couldn’t divulge his dirty little secret.

Prior to Billy, I did what all criminal defense lawyers do — I avoided discussions with my clients about what really happened. I concerned myself only with evidence and procedure. But when Billy slapped me in the face with the truth, I realized I’d been fooling myself for years. I realized that my profession, my reputation, my entire perception of myself, was nothing more than a facade. I was a whore, selling my services to the highest bidder. I wasn’t interested in the truth. I was interested in winning, because winning led to money. I’d completely lost my sense of honor. I’d almost lost my sense of self.

When that realization hit me, I wanted to quit practicing law altogether. But my children were in high school and would soon be going off to college. Caroline had managed our money well, but we didn’t have enough stashed away to allow me to quit outright. So Caroline and I talked it over, and we decided I’d keep going until the kids had graduated and gone on to college. After that, we’d figure out what I was going to do for the rest of my life.

I immediately began to cut back on the number of cases I took. The death penalty cases I was doing were all appointed, payback from judges for the days when I was spinning facts and helping people like Billy Dockery walk out the door. My son was in college and my daughter was a senior in high school. In less than a year, I hoped to finish up the cases I had and walk away from the profession that Uncle Raymond, at least indirectly, had led me to.

By the time I got back from Mountain City, it was almost dark. So far, my birthday had been a bust. Johnny Wayne had been gagged, I’d practically fallen apart in Ma’s room, and the flashback of Sarah’s rape kept playing over and over in my head. I couldn’t reach Caroline or either of the kids on my cell phone. I’d called ten times on the way back down the mountain.

I finally pulled into the driveway and pushed the button on the garage door opener. There wasn’t another car in sight. Rio, my ten-month-old German shepherd, came bounding out of the garage and started his daily ritual of running around the truck. I’d rescued Rio from a bad situation when he was only two months old. I was his hero. When he saw me pull into the driveway every day, the excitement was too much for his young bladder. As soon as I got out of the truck, he peed on my shoe.

Where could they be? I didn’t see my son’s car. When I’d talked to Jack on the phone last week, he promised to come to dinner with us on my birthday. I thought seriously about backing out and going somewhere to drown my sorrows, but I decided I’d go in and see if they left me a note. Surely they wouldn’t forget my birthday. These were the people I loved more than anything else in the world. They’d never forgotten my birthday. They always made a big deal out of it.

Caroline hadn’t said anything that morning, but I’d left at 5:30 a.m. and showered at the gym after I worked out. She and Lilly were still asleep when I walked out the door. Maybe they did forget.

Or maybe something was wrong. Something had to be wrong. I rubbed Rio’s ears for a minute and walked up and opened the door that led to the kitchen. It was dark inside. I let the dog go in ahead of me. It was quiet.

“Hello! Anybody home?” I flipped on the light in the kitchen.

A huge poster had been hung from the kitchen ceiling. It stretched all the way to the floor and was at least six feet wide. It looked like something a high school football team would run through when they took the field for a game. The poster, in bright blue letters, said:

Happy Birthday Dad!

WE LOVE YOU!

I laughed as the three of them came around the corner from the den into the kitchen singing “Happy Birthday.” All three were wearing striped pajamas and grinning like Cheshire cats. They’d tied their wrists together. The Dillard family chain gang. My self-pity vanished and I opened my arms for a group hug.

Caroline announced that they were taking me to dinner, and they quickly changed out of the goofy pajamas. I chose Cafe Pacific, a quiet little place on the outskirts of Johnson City that served the best seafood in town. As I sat in the restaurant eating prawns and scallops in an incredible Thai sauce, I looked at their faces, settling finally on Caroline’s. I’d fallen in love with the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen all those years ago, and she was even more beautiful now. Her wavy auburn hair shimmered in the candlelight. Her smooth, fair skin and deep brown eyes glowed, and when she caught me looking at her I got a coy smile that brought out the dimple in her left cheek. Caroline has the firm, lithe body of a dancer, but it’s soft and curvy where it matters. She’s studied dance all her life and still operates a small dance studio. Lilly is Caroline’s clone, with the exception that her hair runs to a lighter shade and her eyes are hazel. Lilly is seventeen and in her senior year of high school. She wants to be a dancer, or a photographer, or an artist, or a Broadway actress.

Jack looks a lot like me. He just turned nineteen and is tall and muscular, with dark hair and brooding eyes that are nearly black. Jack is a top student and a highly competitive athlete whose goal is to play professional baseball, and he works at it with the intensity of a fanatic. He and I have spent countless hours together practicing on a baseball field. He’ll hit until his hands blister, throw until his arm aches, lift weights until his muscles burn, and run until his legs give out. The work paid off in the form of a scholarship to Vanderbilt.

When the waiter brought me a piece of chocolate cake, Caroline reached into her purse and produced a candle. She stuck it in the cake and lit it.

“Make a wish,” she said.

“And don’t tell us what it is,” Lilly said. She says that every year.

I made a silent wish for an innocent client. And the sooner the better.

Jack reached under the table and pulled out a small, flat, gift-wrapped box.

“This is from all of us,” he said.

I opened the card. There was a message, in Caroline’s handwriting: “Follow your heart. Follow your dreams. We’ll all be there, wherever it leads. We love you.” She was as eager as I to get me out of the legal profession. She thought my work kept me at war with myself — she’d told me more than once that she’d never seen anybody so conflicted. She’d been encouraging me to go to night school and get certified as a high school teacher and a coach.

Inside the package were box seat tickets to an Atlanta Braves game in July.

“I cleared your calendar,” Caroline said. “We’re all going. Don’t you dare schedule anything for that weekend.”

“Not a chance,” I said. It was perfect.

We finished dessert and drove back home around nine. As I pulled into the driveway, the headlights swept over the front porch about thirty feet to the left of the garage. I saw something move. We lived on ten isolated acres on a bluff overlooking Boone Lake about five miles out of the city. We’d left Rio in the house when we went to the restaurant. I stopped just outside the garage and got out of the car. I could hear Rio raising hell inside.

“Go in and turn on the porch light,” I said to Caroline. “You guys stay in the car.”

“No way,” Jack said as he got out of the back seat.

I walked around the corner toward the front with Jack right beside me. Someone got out of the porch swing and stood.

“Who’s there?” I said.

Silence. And then the porch light came on. Standing next to the swing in a pair of ratty khaki shorts and a green T-shirt that said, “Do Me, I’m Irish,” was my sister Sarah.

April 12

11:00 p.m.

By the time Landers returned to his office, the Johnson City detectives had managed to gather more information on the murder victim. John Paul Tester was a widower with one grown kid, a son who was a deputy sheriff and a chaplain at the Cocke County sheriff’s department. Tester had come up to Johnson City to preach at a revival at a little church near Boones Creek. He delivered the sermon, collected almost three hundred dollars from the offering plate for his trouble, left the church around nine, and nobody had seen him since. His bank records showed that he withdrew two hundred dollars in cash from an automatic teller machine at 11:45 p.m. The machine was located inside the Mouse’s Tail. If Tester ran through three hundred dollars there and needed more money around midnight, the Barlowe woman had to have noticed him.

She lied.

Landers spent the afternoon drafting an affidavit for a search warrant and running down a judge. All he had to do was tell the judge that the owner of the club where the murder victim was last seen lied and was refusing to cooperate. The warrant the judge signed authorized the TBI to search the Mouse’s Tail for any evidence relevant to the murder of John Paul Tester. And since it was a strip club, the judge didn’t have any qualms about Landers executing the warrant during business hours.

Landers planned the raid himself. About an hour before the SWAT guys were supposed to hit the front door, he’d go in to check things out, then at the appointed time he’d signal the start of the raid. Landers was looking forward to it, especially the part about checking things out.

A little after nine, he stopped by his place to shower and change. He put on a pair of jeans, a collared black pullover and a jacket, stuck his. 38 in an ankle holster, and drove out to the Mouse’s Tail around 10:15. It was a tacky joint, built of concrete block and painted powder blue. The front entrance was covered by a bright blue awning trimmed in black. A big gray mouse, grinning from ear to ear and with a tail that curled up into what looked like an erect phallus, had been air-brushed on the side of the building that faced the road.

There were twenty or thirty cars in the parking lot out front. Landers had to pay a ten-dollar cover to get past the blonde in the foyer. She looked like a high-end hooker, elaborate make-up and black spandex. Huge breasts. The ATM machine the murder victim withdrew the money from was sitting right beside the counter in front.

Blondie buzzed Landers through into the main part of the club. It was a large, open room, about a hundred feet long and forty feet wide. On each side of the main room were what appeared to be small anterooms, the entrances covered by black curtains. There were three stages, each about the size of a boxing ring, set in a triangle and complete with brass poles. Each stage was framed by mirrors and occupied by a naked, gyrating lady. Cigarette smoke hung in a cloud about ten feet off the floor, and a mirror ball was throwing light around the room. The music was loud. Landers had heard the bass buzzing off the walls from the parking lot. He didn’t recognize the song that was playing, but it was one of those lame rappers.

Landers did a quick head count. There were six people, all men, at the bar to his right and another thirty or so sitting at counters and tables around the stages. Besides the dancers and two waitresses, who were wearing extremely attractive tight white nurse’s outfits, there wasn’t a woman in the place. Landers didn’t see Erlene Barlowe anywhere.

He took a seat at a table toward the back. The redhead on stage was magnificent. She had a gorgeous face and she kept throwing her head around and making her hair fly. Her legs were long, her butt was tight, her breasts were small and firm, and she could move. Landers was sitting there fantasizing about taking her into the bathroom and showing her a good time when one of the nurses stopped by the table. Her little top was a zip-up that hadn’t been zipped up very far. Parts of her were falling out all over the place.

“What can I get you, honey?” she said.

“Club soda. Twist of lime.” The nurse gave Landers a look of contempt when he ordered the club soda. He would much rather have had a whiskey, but he never knew what might happen in a raid. He needed to stay sharp.

Nurse Betty brought his club soda a couple of minutes later. Cost him five-fifty. She gave him an even more contemptible look when he didn’t give her a tip. Landers called Jimmy Brown at 10:45. The raid was supposed to start at eleven straight up. Landers could barely hear Brown over the music. Brown said they were just pulling off the interstate. They’d be in position in five minutes.

That’s when Landers saw Erlene Barlowe, still wearing the leather pants and cheetah top she’d been wearing earlier in the day. She was standing by the bar. Nurse Betty was talking in her ear and pointing in Landers’s direction. The music had stopped and the disc jockey was telling the customers that touching the girls wasn’t allowed. Erlene spotted Landers and headed straight for him.

“Are you here to arrest me, handsome?” she said when she got to the table. “Or are you just a bad boy looking for a good time?”

“You remember the guy I was asking you about? The dead guy who wasn’t here? He withdrew some money out of the ATM machine out there in your lobby last night.”

“Well I swan, honey, I must have just missed him somehow.”

“My name isn’t honey. It’s Landers. Special Agent Landers. And you’re about to find out how much I hate it when sluts lie to me.” Landers took out his phone and dialed Jimmy Brown. “You guys ready?”

“All set. Standing outside the front door.”

“Go.”

There was a scream from the lobby, and the door banged open. SWAT officers in black combat gear and helmets came rushing in. They looked like Navy SEALs. They had their weapons up and were yelling, “Police! Get on the floor! Get on the floor!”

Landers stood up and pointed his. 38 at Erlene Barlowe’s face.

“This is a raid,” he said. “Get your hands up against that wall and don’t move until I tell you to.”

The look on her face was priceless.

April 26

11:00 a.m.

Two weeks after my birthday, I finished up a hearing on a drug case in federal court in Greeneville and had just gotten in my truck to drive back to Johnson City when I looked at my cell phone and saw a text message from Caroline: “Call me. Urgent.”

Caroline had taken on the job as my secretary/paralegal two years earlier, after we made the decision that I was getting out. Since I was taking fewer cases, I needed to cut down on my overhead. The classes Caroline taught at her dance studio were held in the evenings, so she volunteered. When the lease was up on my office downtown, I helped my secretary find a job at another law firm and moved the essentials out to my house. The move saved me almost sixty thousand dollars a year, and Caroline took an on-line course and got herself certified as a paralegal. She turned out to be a quick study. I still had a small conference room downtown where I met clients, but it only cost me two hundred a month.

“What’s up?” I said when Caroline answered the phone.

“Could be good, could be bad,” she said. “A woman named Erlene Barlowe called early this morning. She was frantic. She said the police barged into her house and arrested a young friend of hers for murder and that she needed to hire a lawyer. She kept saying the girl couldn’t have done it.”

Right.

“She wants to meet with you. It’s been a long time since you’ve been hired privately on a murder case.”

“Billy Dockery’s mother hired me.” I’d never told anyone about Billy’s confession. Not even Caroline.

“You made a lot of money on that case, didn’t you?”

“Fifty thousand.”

“We could use it.”

“I thought we were in good shape.”

“We are, but a murder case? And this one could be big money, babe. It’s the case where the preacher was murdered. The one who was found in the motel room.”

“I don’t want to take on a murder case, Caroline, high profile or low profile. It could go on for years.”

“That’s why I didn’t make her an appointment.” She sounded disappointed.

I thought about it for a minute, weighing the pros and the cons. Curiosity finally got the best of me.

“Ah, what the heck, it won’t hurt to talk to her. Call her back and have her meet me downtown at one.”

It took me an hour to drive back to Johnson City. I ate a quick lunch at a cafe about two blocks from my conference room and walked in the door about ten minutes before one. There was a woman sitting at the table waiting for me. She stood when I came in. It was all I could do to keep my jaw from dropping. She was dressed in tight, black spandex pants and an orange and black tiger-striped top that nearly exposed the nipples on her very substantial breasts. Her hair was a shade of red I’d never seen before, on or off a woman’s head.

“Joe Dillard,” I said as I shook her hand. Her fingernails were at least an inch long and painted the same design as her shirt.

“Erlene Barlowe. You’re even better-looking in person than you are on television.” She smiled, and when I looked her in the eye, I saw that despite the shocking outfit, she was an attractive woman. I motioned toward the chair.

“What can I do for you, Ms. Barlowe?”

“Oh, honey, I have the most terrible problem. It’s just awful. A very close young lady friend of mine has been arrested for a crime she didn’t commit.”

“Close friend?”

“More like a daughter. I sort of took her in about a month ago.”

“Start from the beginning, Ms. Barlowe. Tell me everything you want me to know.”

“Please, sugar, call me Erlene. I suppose I should start by telling you that I own the Mouse’s Tail Gentlemen’s Club. My husband and I owned it together, but he passed away last year and now I’m running it. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen you out there.”

I laughed. “Haven’t had the pleasure. I’ve heard a lot about it, though.”

“Doesn’t surprise me. We’ve had several lawyers come and go over the years. A couple of judges, too.”

Which judges? I considered asking her, but then I decided I didn’t want to know. I didn’t care what they did. Before long, I’d be moving on.

“Tell me about your friend.”

“Have you heard they made an arrest in the murder of that pastor from Newport? The one who was stabbed?”

“I think everybody’s heard.”

“She didn’t do it, Mr. Dillard. I’d swear it on a stack of bibles. I want to hire you to represent her.”

“How do you know she didn’t do it?”

“Because I was with her all night. I drove her home from the club after her shift ended. She lives at my place and she never went out. She couldn’t have done it. And besides that, she’s the sweetest, kindest little thing you’ll ever meet. She wouldn’t so much as step on a bug, let alone kill a human being.”

Erlene Barlowe had an almost mesmerizing southern drawl and a sweet kind of charm about her. The fact that she was easy to look at, even in those wild clothes, made the conversation even more pleasant. I got the sense a few times that there might be more to Erlene than she wanted me to see, but there was something about her — maybe danger — that genuinely intrigued me.

After a half-hour, I glanced back over my notes. She said she’d taken Angel Christian, the girl who was arrested, into her home after Angel showed up here on a bus with another girl, a dancer named Julie Hayes, a little over a month ago. She said Angel reminded her of her dead husband’s beautiful young daughter, who’d been killed in a car accident. I got the distinct impression she’d convinced herself that Angel was the reincarnation of the daughter. She said Angel had suffered some serious abuse at home and was a runaway. She mentioned something about Angel’s hands.

I was more than a little concerned about a few things. Erlene told me that she’d initially lied to a TBI agent named Phil Landers. I knew Landers, and I didn’t care for him at all. She said Angel Christian wasn’t the girl’s real name. She said the police had obtained a warrant to take a hair sample from Angel, or whatever her name was, and one from Erlene. That meant DNA evidence would probably be involved, and DNA almost always proved to be devastating to defendants. The police obviously had witnesses or some other evidence or they wouldn’t have been able to get the warrants. And she said something about the police searching for a missing Corvette.

But Erlene was adamant about the girl’s innocence, and if she was telling the truth, it certainly didn’t sound like Angel had either the motive or the opportunity to commit a murder. I was tempted, but not so tempted that I was willing to take on a murder case that would probably wind up going to trial. I didn’t want to waste any more of her time, and I didn’t want to just flat out refuse her, so I decided to set the bar so high she’d either be unable or unwilling to jump it.

“Erlene, do you have any idea how much it would cost you to hire me on a case like this? A first-degree murder. I heard something about the death penalty on the radio, you know. And it’ll most likely go to trial.”

“Mr. Dillard, my husband provided well for me, both while he was alive and after he passed. Money isn’t something I’m concerned about.”

She shouldn’t have said that. The price I had in mind immediately doubled.

“I’m going to be honest with you, ma’am,” I said. “I’m planning to get out of this business sometime in the next year. If I took on this case, it would mean I might have to stay a lot longer than I want to.”

“Please, Mr. Dillard. I’ll pay you whatever you want. You’re the best lawyer around here. I’ve been hearing about you and reading about you for years. You’ve even represented some of my girls — just piddly stuff years ago — but they all spoke so highly of you. I wouldn’t want anyone else to defend my sweet little Angel. Why don’t you think of it as your last hurrah? You can go out with a great big bang.”

I took a deep breath. “You’ve only known this girl a month. Are you telling me you’d be willing to put up a quarter of a million dollars for her defense?”

She didn’t bat an eye. “Angel didn’t kill anybody, Mr. Dillard. I swear it. I’ll do whatever I have to do.”

“That’s the only way I’ll do it. Two hundred fifty thousand, cash, up front, non-refundable. And that’s just for me. You’ll also have to pay the expenses. We’ll need an investigator, and we may need experts. They’re not cheap.”

“Tell you what, sweetie,” she said, “why don’t you go down to the jail and meet Angel. When you get finished, you give me a call and I’ll have your money.”

April 26

3:00 p.m.

On the way to the jail, I seriously considered not taking the case. I’d made up my mind to get out, and the time had come. Lilly would be graduating in a month, and I only had a couple cases left. But the money… wow! A quarter of a million? Would she really pay it? That kind of money would go a long way toward giving Caroline and me some peace of mind. I decided to wait and make up my mind after I talked to the girl.

As soon as the door to the attorney’s room opened, I realized Erlene Barlowe had been telling the truth about at least one thing. The girl was beautiful. I stood up while two guards held her elbow as she shuffled into the room, shackled at the ankles. They helped her into the chair as though they were seating her for a gourmet dinner, then backed out the door. For a second, I thought they might bow. The door closed, and I sat back down.

“I’ve never seen that before,” I said.

She smiled absently.

“Guards aren’t polite to inmates, male or female. I’ve never seen a guard help an inmate with a chair.”

Her hair was the color of polished mahogany and flowed like a mountain waterfall from her head to just beneath her shoulders. Her nose was small and thin and turned up slightly. She had almond-shaped eyes that were a rich brown. Her left eyebrow was slightly higher than her right, giving the impression that she was perpetually interested, or maybe perpetually perplexed. Her lips were full and protruded ever so slightly, and even in the standard-issue orange jumpsuit, I could see that her body was magnificent.

“My name is Joe Dillard,” I said. “I’m a lawyer. Erlene Barlowe asked me to come and talk to you.”

“I’m Angel,” she said, “Angel Christian.” Her voice was a gentle soprano.

“Do you understand why you’re here, Miss Christian?”

“Yes.” There was a slight pause. “Murder.”

She put her elbows on the table and began to cry softly. I’d seen hundreds of clients cry, male and female. I’d grown hardened to tears and the accompanying sounds, but the crying of this beautiful young girl touched me. I stood up and knocked on the door. A guard opened it immediately.

“Do you guys have any tissue around here?” I said.

The guard glanced over my shoulder at Angel, then scowled at me. “What’d you do to her?”

“Nothing. Do you have tissue or not?”

“Hang on, I’ll find something.”

He disappeared briefly, returned with a roll of toilet paper, and gave it to me with another scowl. I closed the door and handed the roll to Angel.

“Best we can do, I’m afraid.”

“Thank you,” she said. “I’m sorry I’m crying.”

“Don’t worry about it. I see it a lot.”

“I can’t believe this,” she said through a sob. “Do I have to stay here? Can’t I go home to Miss Erlene’s house?”

“I’m sorry, I’m afraid you’re going to be here for a while. Do you want to talk about what happened?”

“Nothing happened.” She sniffled and blew her nose.

“Are you telling me you didn’t have anything to do with Reverend Tester’s murder?”

“I didn’t kill him. I didn’t do a thing to him.”

“Did you know him?”

“I never saw him before he came into the club that night. I was waiting tables. I waited on him.”

“Tell me about it.”

She bit her lower lip and gathered herself. “He ordered a double scotch on the rocks. He started flirting with me right away. A couple of times he yelled all the way across the bar at me, you know, making a scene. Then, as he got drunker, he started quoting the bible and acting really strange. Every time I got near him, he would try to rub up against me. He finally tried to kiss me and asked me to leave with him. That’s when Miss Erlene and Ronnie came over and asked him to leave.”

“So that’s it? You didn’t see him again after he left, and he was alive and well when he walked out the door?”

“That’s it, I swear. They told him to leave. I didn’t see him again. Then a couple of days later, a bunch of policemen came to Miss Erlene’s house. She told me not to talk to any of them, so I didn’t, but one of them had a piece of paper that said I had to give him some of my hair. They tore Miss Erlene’s house all to pieces. Then they came back this morning and put me in the car and brought me down here.”

As she spoke, something kept nagging at me. It took me a few minutes to realize what it was, and when I did, I could only wonder. Sitting in front of me was one of the most beautiful young women I’d ever encountered, with a body so sexy that under normal circumstances I’d have either been aroused or, at the very least, distracted. But despite the incredible packaging, Angel didn’t emit even a whiff of sexuality. Talking to her was very much like talking to a child.

“Did the police officer ask you any questions when he arrested you?” I said.

“He tried after we got here. He took me into a room like this. But Miss Erlene told me not to say a word to him, so I didn’t. I think he’s pretty mad at me.”

Either Angel and Erlene were two of the best liars I’d ever met, or the police had made a monumental blunder. I had no love for Agent Landers — he was a dishonest, womanizing sleaze with an ego the size of a skyscraper — but the TBI was known as a top-flight investigative agency. I found it hard to believe they’d arrest someone for first-degree murder unless they had a solid case.

“Have you ever been in any kind of trouble with the law, Miss Christian? Ever been arrested for anything?”

“No.”

“Not even a traffic ticket?”

“I don’t even know how to drive.”

She started sobbing again. She seemed so helpless, so utterly incapable of violence. My heart went out to her, and I kept asking myself why. Why would she murder some stranger? What could possibly have happened that would have turned this young girl into a killer?

As I sat there wondering, she looked over the tissue at me, her eyes shining with tears, and she said, “Help me, Mr. Dillard. Please, help me.”

Suddenly, the voice I was hearing wasn’t hers. It was a voice from the past, the voice of a defenseless little girl… “Get him off of me, Joey. He’s hurting me.”

I looked at her and nodded my head.

“Okay, Miss Christian,” I said. “I’ll help you. You’ve got yourself a lawyer.”